


How we live the days we have

by TetrodotoxinB



Category: Captain America (Movies), The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Grieving, Happy Ending, Hope, Illness, M/M, Memories, Terminal diagnosis, What Could Have Been, discussions of mortality, no one dies
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-06-26
Updated: 2017-06-26
Packaged: 2018-11-19 10:58:45
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,210
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11311980
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TetrodotoxinB/pseuds/TetrodotoxinB
Summary: This is a vignette of Steve and Bucky discussing Steve's health pre-serum. Steve discloses something startling about his past and they talk through the implications.I wrote this after Icoulddothisallday asked me for a sick!Steve drabble. It's probably not what she had in mind, but it's what I managed to pull together.Beta'd by vixxjungsuri and Sandy.





	How we live the days we have

**Author's Note:**

  * For [icoulddothisallday](https://archiveofourown.org/users/icoulddothisallday/gifts).



The sun had been up for a while but with Bucky’s head on his chest, Steve didn’t have any motivation to get up. Bucky shifted against him and Steve pulled him a little tighter against his side.

“Hey, Stevie?”

Steve looked down at Bucky who was looking thoughtfully out the window. “Yeah, Buck?”

“You know all those fights you used to get in back in the day?”

Steve looked back up at the ceiling. “Yeah.”

“What were you trying to prove?”

Steve shifted and Bucky pulled his head back a little so they could look each other in the eyes. He wasn’t sure what had brought up this train of thought but Steve didn’t make a habit of lying to Bucky. “I didn’t have anything to prove. I was dying.”

Bucky’s mouth fell open. “Say that again?” 

“I was dying, Buck. Had been since I was little. Felt like doing something with my life while I had it.”

Bucky’s brow knit up and he looked away. “I didn’t know.”

Steve nodded and gave Bucky a squeeze, feeling guilty. “I never told you. Didn’t want you to worry anymore than you already did.”

Bucky tensed and his voice was filled with worry. “But Steve, I could have helped pay for medicine and doctors. My ma would’ve understood. She loved you, you could’ve-”

“Buck,” Steve’s voice was soft when he cut Bucky off. “I knew since I was little. The doctors told my ma that I wouldn’t live to graduate high school and when I did they said I was living on borrowed time. My lungs were shot and it was only getting worse.”

“Fuck,” Bucky breathed. He sounded like the word was punched out of him.

Steve nodded but said nothing. He hadn’t meant to keep it from Bucky, but it had been so long that it never seemed important to bring it up before. After a minute, Bucky scooted closer again and put his head back on Steve’s chest, right over his heart.

Steve closed his eyes as Bucky listened to his heart. “It’s alright now, Buck. The serum fixed it.”

Bucky’s fingers dug into Steve’s skin and his voice was small. “I know, but the war… You were gonna let me go off and never tell me. I didn’t really get to say goodbye. I never would have gotten to say it.”

Steve closed his eyes. It had crushed him to say goodbye to Bucky because, not only did he know Bucky might not come back, he wouldn’t be there to meet him if he did. His chest had ached without Bucky because the days after Bucky shipped out were just Steve biding his time until the inevitable. The light that was Bucky had left when he did. 

Even without the ache of grief in his chest, it had been harder each day just to take a breath. Finally, the drip of a tear onto his chest pulled Steve out of his memories.

“I know, Buck. I’m sorry. I never wanted to hurt you. I hated being left behind but I didn’t want the last thing you took with you to be knowledge that I would die alone while you were gone. War was going to be hard enough without that.”

Steve could feel as more tears ran off Bucky’s face and onto his chest.

“Is that why you kept trying to enlist?” 

“Yeah. I was gonna die either way, figured I might as well make it worth something.”

Bucky’s voice cracked. “God, Stevie.”

“Buck-”

Buck shook his head. “No, I wanna know. How- how would you have gone?”

Steve took a deep breath. He had looked it up once he got out of the ice. He knew what they called it now and he had read the accounts. It seemed worse now that he knew what he had been facing. 

“My lungs would have scarred over, the process was already advanced. Eventually, they would have stopped getting enough oxygen into my blood. When that got bad enough -- congestive heart failure. My heart was barely hanging on as it was, it wouldn’t have taken much. As it was, I maybe had another year.”

After several minutes of silence, Bucky finally spoke. “Were you suffering? Would you have suffered?” 

Steve knew that Bucky would want to know and he couldn’t bring himself to gloss over it. “Yeah. I had headaches all the time from the lack of oxygen. My chest always felt too tight, and it wasn’t just the asthma. It’s why I was always so tired and couldn’t put on any muscle. Didn’t have the air to do it with. If I hadn’t had the serum…”

Steve paused. He wasn’t sure in retrospect why he had looked it up. When he realized how he would have died, Steve had promptly broken down crying. The fate that he had only narrowly escaped was horrifying, and the horror of that knowledge never really went away. But Bucky wanted to know and Steve couldn’t lie to him.

“If I hadn’t had the serum,” he continued, “my lungs would have gotten worse until my heart started to fail. And once I got to that point, my lungs would have started to fill with fluid. If organ failure or pneumonia didn’t get me first, I would have drowned in it. It would have been slow and I would have suffered.”

“And you would have been alone.”

Steve nodded. “Yeah, Buck. I would have been alone.”

That he would die early had been the foregone conclusion of Steve’s entire life before the serum. He had made peace with it before he ever made it out of grammar school. It didn’t seem so terrifying like it had to everyone else, but now that he had a lifetime stretched out before him, the thought of losing it all, especially now that he had Bucky like this, was nauseating.

“Stevie?”

“Yeah, Buck?”

Bucky propped himself up on an elbow and scooted up where he was even with Steve’s face. “You okay?”

Steve forced a smile. “Sure.”

Bucky smiled sadly. “You don’t look okay. I’m sorry I asked about it.”

Steve shrugged and looked away. “I brought it up.”

“Yeah, you did, but I think you wanted me to know,” Bucky guessed.

Steve sighed. “Yeah, I guess I did. It’s a lot to carry around and even though I don’t have to worry about it anymore, it’s been hard to stop living like I’m dying.”

Bucky nodded knowingly and laid his head back on Steve’s shoulder. “That’s not all bad. Some people waste their days, not realizing that death could be here at any moment. But you don’t gotta try to hurry it up by jumping in front of every bullet you come across. Not every fight has to be yours.”

Steve huffed out a small breath, almost a laugh. “Yeah, you’re probably right about that.”

Bucky nudged him. “Come on, let’s get up. I wanna take my fella to Coney Island today. We got some living to do.”

Steve stretched down for a kiss that Bucky happily returned. Eventually, they parted and Steve smiled, grateful for Bucky’s perceptiveness. 

“Yeah, a date sounds good,” Steve said, brimming with hope and grateful for the miracle of another day with Bucky.


End file.
